Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

5.20.2012

The Films of 2012: This Is Not a Film

Jafar Panahi’s This Is
Not a Film, shot covertly in
Panahi’s Tehran apartment and smuggled out of the country in a cake, refers to
itself as “an effort” instead of a film—partly in order to raise teasing
questions about what films are/are not, but also, it seems, for legal
reasons. After running into
numerous conflicts with the Iranian government over the course of his career,
Panahi has been sentenced to house arrest and forbidden from making films for
twenty years. This Is Not a
Film, then, becomes an act of
artistic nose-thumbing, a snapshot of Iranian life so mundane and uneventful
that it seems incapable of giving offense, yet one in which every incident is
so loaded with political weight that it ends up being even more excoriating a
critique of its government’s politics than if it had been twice as pointed. It’s a clever, beguiling piece of
political cinema as well as an experiment in film theory, a meditation on what
and how films mean, in every sense of that term.

A scant seventy-five
minutes, This Is Not a Film
follows Panahi over the course of what appears to be an ordinary day. We see Panahi watch television, feed
his daughter’s pet iguana, and take phone calls from his lawyer, his wife, and
his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who eventually stops by the apartment. It’s then that Panahi begins describing
his idea for what was to have been his next narrative film: if he cannot shoot
it, he will at least explain what it would have looked like. He tapes off the living room rug into
sections to create a makeshift set, dictates camera movements, demonstrates the
blocking of the actors. Finally,
frustrated, he turns to Mirtahmasb, who has been shooting this with a shoulder
cam: “if we can tell a film, why make a film?” A crucial question—except that Panahi and Mitrhamasb have,
in effect, already begun making the film in the very act of pretending not
to. The true artist, the film
suggests, is powerless to give up his art: he will find a way to continue it,
even if he has to use the crudest and most commonplace tools to do so (much of This
Is Not a Film was shot on Panahi’s
iPhone).

Then, in the final twenty minutes, real drama enters
the film in the form of a young garbage collector who shows up at Panahi’s door
to pick up his trash, and who allows Panahi and his camera to accompany him on
his rounds. Suddenly, Panahi does
not have to invent a subject: he has been given one, an ordinary person
performing his job, and he and we are incapable of turning away. What we’re finally left with at the end
of This Is Not a Film is the profound
realization that cinema can arise seemingly out of nowhere and nothing—a man
with an iPhone interviewing a garbage collector—a force beyond restraint or control.